Spending days or weeks outside in a place that gets a lot of rain, you quickly learn that there’s nothing more important than staying dry. It can also feel like there’s nothing more impossible. When you spend all day paddling or hiking in the rain, then set up camp in the rain and start a fire in the rain and cook dinner in the rain and fall asleep to rain drumming on your tent, water seems to permeate everything. It’s enough to make you crawl into the nearest bed with some popcorn and Netflix and wait for a better forecast.
But don’t do it! I’ve lived and guided in three of the wettest places on earth-the east side of Hawaii’s Big Island, Southeast Alaska, and Fiordland National Park, New Zealand, which get get 126, 152, and 264 inches of rain a year, respectively-and it turns out you can be sort-of dry and even semi-comfortable in a place where your boots grow mold if you don’t wear them for a week. (True story.) A few of my favorite tricks:
1. Maintain sacred socks
This is a pair of toasty wool socks that live in your sleeping bag and never come out. They are for one thing and one thing only: sleeping. No matter how wet and gross your other socks are, resist the urge to stick your sacred socks into your boots. If morning dawns and the only other thing you have to put on your feet are sopping, half-frozen rags that smell like garbage, so be it. Your feet will thank you later.
2. Use Gold Bond
Heaps of it. The inside of your tent should look like a snow globe after your evening powdering ritual. Bonus: It masks the smell of moldering gear.
3. Keep your waterproof-breathable gear clean
You’re carrying armloads of duffy cedar to start a fire and clambering over mossy logs and getting splashed with salt water? That sounds like fun, but when you go home soak your Gore-Tex in some Tech Wash. Dirty waterproof-breathables doesn’t work as well as clean. Also, no matter what your manufacturer claims, they lose their effectiveness over time. Don’t take your circa-1996 jacket that looks all vintage and cool in Colorado with you to New Zealand. Invest in a new waterproof-breathable.
4. Know your systems
This is true in any environment, but especially in wet ones. You don’t want to be digging around in an open bag trying to track down your headlamp when buckets of water are pouring from the sky.
5. Wear a lighter around your neck
Ideally, your systems will be so dialed that you’ll never be soaked to the skin. Duct tape a lighter to some p-cord and wear it as a necklace, and you’ll have the one tool you need for emergency warmth on hand and dry at all times.
6. Never leave a dry bag open
Even if the sun is shining and there’s not a cloud in sight. NEVER. You will open and close approximately 682,000 dry bags a day. You will have dreams about opening and closing dry bags. This is okay.
7. Ziplocs are a girl’s best friend
Well, mine anyway. When I was guiding, I’d put my most important items, like my journal, in a two-gallon ziplock, which would then go inside a lightweight Sea to Summit dry bag, which would then go inside my giant NRS dry bag. It never got wet. On a Grand Canyon river trip, I got lazy-it was the desert!- and put my DSLR camera inside a single dry bag. Then I flipped a raft and my camera was ruined. The only part that stayed dry? A spare lens stuffed inside a Ziploc.
8. Wear your hood
Wet hair can stay wet for days. Wet = cold.
9. Compactor trash bags are just as good as dry bags for a short trip
Not any old trash bags will do-spring for the compactor ones. Line your backpack with one and gooseneck it at the top, or use them inside your big dry bag for compartmentalization and extra waterproofing. You can even stick them inside you boots for dry(er) feet.
10. Learn to set up a very high tarp
You can have a fire and cook dinner under it. You will be happy.
Rain is freaking beautiful, so get out and enjoy it. Unless you live in Southwest Colorado, as I do now, in which case rain is the only good excuse you’ll ever have to watch Netflix and stay in bed.
Am I the only one who uses hand sanitizer on my feet? I also have a little spray bottle of rubbing alcohol that I use in my boots and I’ve always been able to eliminate odor that way.
what a great idea! thanks!!
The pediatrician told us when my boys were young that it is bacteria that makes feet smell. Sanitizer kills bacteria.. makes sense to me to use it on your feet.
I say: carry a light weight golf umbrella. It’s 14 oz of weight is invaluable on the trail when you have to do first aid or foot repair, or read a map/teach map reading, change layers in nasty weather, dig in your pack on a rainy day. Great for when nature calls any time of the day or night, especially for those who are shy out in the middle of the Arctic tundra. I only regret my umbrella when the sun shines for days on end, but then we use it as shade from the sun when it does not go down for days.
Great article! Funny, practical. Excellent tips. Keep writing.
I forgot to add: I have used it several times to scare off bears as well. They have no idea what the bleep they are up against, and they run away!
In truly wet weather I usually ditch the waterproof-breathable for Helly Hansen or Grunden PVC raingear. You can’t run a trail marathon in them, but you can sit in pouring rain with a layer of fleece under them for days and be perfectly warm and happy. Even Gore-tex Pro or 5 layer has a saturation point in my experience.
When do you put goldbond powder in your tent? When you’ve returned from your trip or on every rainy day on the trail?
After you return from your rainy day hike to your tent and it’s time to ‘hit the sack’ you powder your pits, ‘bits’, and feet. At least feet. So you are all nice and dry in bed. The powder does tend to ‘drift’ a bit as you liberally apply it, hence the snow globe comment.
I hike and hunt on the Olympic peninsula. Can second.
hike & camp in the sonoran desert here in Arizona, not much worry about wet weather!
I have the breathable rain gear and it is awesome for hiking but in all day rain, when i stop for lunch etc. I like to throw a poncho over me too. this double protection has always worked for me.
Great article! I’ve done some hiking and camping in the rain but only do a few of these things. Now I can up my game.
What an enjoyable and thoroughly practical article and community contributions. More like this please! 2016 doesn’t matter; still very pertinent in 2023.
We like to be bravado about rain here in the PNW but hypothermia isn’t funny at all. It was only after I found a wool my skin could tolerate (thrifted cashmere) that I realized how often I had been very hypothermic and didn’t even realize it, and neither did the two trout fishermen I hiked with!
I’ll never forget an early camping trip when I only brought one pair of jeans. A sudden ‘seating’ on a soaking moss covered log left me with a very very soggy cold butt for three days. Extra Clothing is a ten essential for that reason!
The loggers wore those wide brimmed red felt hats for a reason too. They keep a lot more rain off than caps.
I’m going to take the “sacred sox” to heart, put in two pair too.
And ziplock bags absolutely rule for all kinds of travel. The newer ones with the sliding closures are easier to use when fingers are cold, wet and fumbling.
One day I threw an old chamois in my trail gear and it’s been well used for toweling face & hands in frigid waters. Squeezes almost dry quickly.
Can’t wait for the alpine roads to open up again this summer and taunt the rain clouds.
Agree on the “thrifted cashmere” (moth holes don’t affect the warmth)– like angora, cashmere doesn’t stink, it’s comfy and it insulates even when wet. I take old turtlenecks and cut into tank tops.
I leave socks in as you do but at night I put clothes in the bottom also.
Great for the next early damp morning .
Also saran wrap is great for warmth (old jockey trick.
Last but not least good old Rosinol to get a wet fire going after you have found as much under leaf dry as you can.
If not it works anyway.
I carry one of those compact theme park-style ponchos in my guide pack. It’s ideal for that person who didn’t bring a (good) waterproof or for putting on for putting up/taking down tents or that night-time wee mission.
Gaiters, a good pair like OR
Great article! Dry bags, sacred socks, and tarp might be the top 3.
In chilly boreal and arctic rain, a little canister stove to start a fire in the rain works great, like starting a BBQ with gas rather than briquettes. Has saved lives from hypothermic demise in the pre-cargo zipper, pre-dry-suit days of packrafting.
Probably will sound off, but I find in Alaska at least, that a floorless mid (instead of a tent + tarp) for multi-day and multi-week trips is drier that a tent with a floor. Sure, the ground is wet but it becomes pretty easy to make a little island of dryness within in it and I can change into my dry PJs under the mid and bring in my wet shoes and everything else and it’s a heck of a lot lighter to carry a wet ‘mid than a wet tent. I know that many out there might shake their head and think “stupid idea” but it’s worked for me since Chouinard Equipment (pre-BD) came out with the first Megamid in the early 1980s. I have been using this style ever since and put in quite a few miles here in AK with that system.
When I hike the AT I use my double poncho backpack cover and it works perfectly. Always dry.